👋 Hi Reader,
At this point in time, I might be sounding like a broken record.
I have always implored you to use AI for everything except for your writing. I talked about this last week too, when I talked about how Pangram and other AI detection tools are so trained on online writing, that they have started to build false positives for even human-written content showing up as AI-generated.
Here's the rub: there have been too many patterns of kicking the proverbial can down the road for continuing to rely on AI for writing, instead of you know...just writing by hand.
But I see two signs this week, which means that we might see the return to authenticity and the end of the AI slump:
1. Anthropic's announcement of putting watermarks within AI content
In simple terms, if you have been using Claude to write content, you have metadata attached to your content, that travels wherever it is being used, regardless of how much you tweak it over time.
Anthropic's announcement about watermarking AI-generated content
2. Clay's internal policy around AI writing
Clay is a data enrichment and outbound automation platform. Clay's CEO, Varun Anand, announced this week that they formalized an internal policy around AI-assisted writing.
Again in plain speak, Varun's saying that if you are using AI to completely outsource your writing, you might as well put the prompt upfront, rather than force people to read through the AI output.
And if you are indeed writing something with AI, you better stand behind it, or don’t rely on it at all.
Varun Anand's LinkedIn announcement
If you combine these two announcements with last week's LetterStack issue covering the LinkedIn user-reported AI slop announcement, you know that it is going to get difficult writing with AI on the fly and conducting 'content heists' anymore.
What, no more getting away with AI content?
For one, the jury is out on how social networks will deal with watermarks within your AI content. Meta was already ahead of the curve by starting to flag early this year what it thinks is AI-assisted content on Instagram and Facebook.
Both announcements would sound like the end of the world for people who rely entirely on AI tools for writing.
I believe it is not so much about the end of an era for AI content, but instead it is the rebound of going back to original perspective.
At least for writing, the intent here is to do the lazy minimum:
Write a prompt about a topic in your niche
Get the research from your AI tool of choice
Understand all the angles that you have on this topic and research, again with AI tools.
Think about it in your own words and context
Think about it as you would apply it to your daily routine
Transcribe on Google Docs on your brain dump from 4 and 5.
Publish.
That reflects your original thinking on derived information.
It sounds lazy, but that’s also something that nobody can write on your behalf, because they don’t know what kind of context or intent you had behind using this information.
I believe doing this bare minimum that itself should solve for the problems highlighted in Clay's announcement:
1. Since you thought about it yourself, you stand by it
2. And you looked at the content generated from AI, but put your own perspective on top as an original observation.
3. If you spent more time reading and thinking through the AI output, then you are revealing what you understood about the information provided.
Consequently you might also reveal what you are curious about what you don’t know (the unknown unknowns, if you will) about your niche.
The gap between what you think you understand and what you can articulate from what you understood is where your most authentic AI-assisted writing will thrive.
Are you also overwhelmed by what you heard in the news this week from Clay and Anthropic? I would love to be a sounding board.
Let me know by hitting ‘Reply’ on this email, or send a note to [email protected].
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Cheers,
Renga from LetterStack
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